You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (32 page)

I took a GED prep class, which was held at an elementary school on the other side of town. The halls were decorated with hand tracings made to look like dinosaurs. I dodged little kids, struggling with backpacks bigger than they were and made my way to the strangely miniaturized bathroom with the foot pedal sinks and powdery green soap. I tried to remember if my elementary school was like this but I had absolutely no recollection of it.

My GED-prep classmates and I were riddled with the same insecurities; all of us were just hoping to have that piece of paper to prove that we were not complete failures at life. We all craved the same thing, a stamp of approval that told us that we were just as good as everyone else, even though our paths had not been the norm.

I liked my classmates. During breaks I hung out in the hallway and shared a bag of Doritos with a sixteen-year-old girl who sat near me. She was tired and her stringy hair wouldn’t stay behind her ears, no matter how many times she tucked it back. The day before she had gone home after a double shift at the fast food place to find that her baby was inconsolable. It turned out that the neighbor, who had been watching him, hadn’t bothered to change his diaper in more than twelve hours. My friend worried that she’d need to find some money to take him to the doctor to tend to the sores he had, since they didn’t seem to be clearing up. Another guy had dropped out of high school to help with the family farm when his father was diagnosed with cancer. Someone else had just been released from juvenile hall. Since I didn’t volunteer the information, no one asked why I was there and no one told me that I “looked like that girl.” As we sat and went over workbooks of scientific equations, we all realized that we were not alone in not fitting in. There was a whole world of us, with our stories that made people cock their heads sideways at us.

Our teacher came to me the last day, holding the completion form
for the prep class. It had some general demographic questions as well as questions about my experience of the program. She had looked over the form and wanted to make sure that I had checked the correct box for my annual income range for the previous year.

“Is this right, dear?” She asked, pointing to the top box.

“Oh. Yeah. It’s right.”

She looked at me with a questioning look on her face.

“I used to be an actor.”

It was the first time I had said that. Using the past tense had never felt so profound. I was also pretty sure that would be the last time I would check the top box.

She smiled and patted my hand.

“Well, that’s nice, darlin’. I just wanted to make sure that you understood the question.”

She ensured that I had my #2 pencils and sent me off to the local high school to take the GED. There were maybe fifty of us, all gathered to take the seven-hour test and prove something to our parents, our friends, our former teachers and ourselves. We were armed with Red Bulls, granola bars, and frayed nerves. It was our chance to prove that we were just as good as people who had that high school diploma. Weren’t we? We hoped we were, despite the surreptitious routes that had gotten us there. We filled in the bubbles completely.

When the test results came in the mail, I tucked them under my arm and locked myself in the bathroom. If I had failed, I didn’t want to have to deal with that in front of my soon-to-be-MBA smarty-pants boyfriend. If I had failed it would mean that I really wasn’t cut out for the real world, I wasn’t smart enough to do anything but be an actor. If I had failed it would mean sucking it up, going back to L.A. and admitting that I made a mistake. I’d have to go back to pretending.

I didn’t fail.

A little, tiny, porthole-sized door opened to my future. The light streamed in. Maybe there was an alternate life available. Maybe the real
world would accept me. Maybe I could adapt and learn how to do this thing. The GED results came with a certificate, which I framed alongside my two-day filmmaking class diploma.

“I get that a lot,” is one of my favorite phrases. It’s a classic, like, “carpe diem,” or, “this too shall pass.” It gets me through a multitude of uncomfortable situations in which I am recognized by someone who thinks they know me but are not entirely sure. It tends to follow the omnipresent “You look like that girl…” It is not a lie and yet, it sidesteps the obvious question of whether or not I am in fact, “that girl.” Most of the time, people squint a little harder, nod slowly and then move on, without further interrogation. The evening can then proceeded. No one is uncomfortable or overly excited and nobody pulls out a cell phone camera.

Jeremy took me on a date to celebrate my GED: drinks at a trendy local bar. We sat in a cozy booth amongst the glowing, happily inebriated people wearing hip clothes and cowboy boots. When the waiter came to take our drink order, he gave me The Look, that some might interpret as
Can I get your number?
In my case it tends to mean
my cable package includes HBO
.

“Hi?” he asked. The greeting was a thinly veiled question.

“Hello.”

“Why do I know you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I come here a lot.”

That was not entirely true; I had been there twice. Eager to change the subject, I asked for an apple martini.

“Sorry, what did you just order?

“Apple martini.”

“With a twist or olive?”

That particular combination didn’t sound terribly appealing, so I just asked for an apple slice.

“We have an apple martini, would you like that instead?”

“Great idea, thanks.”

Jeremy ordered a beer. We were brought two apple martinis. When he asked for it to be changed to a beer, the waiter apologized to him.

“I am totally distracted by your lady friend. Did you see
Mrs. Doubtfire
? You look like that girl.”

The set up was perfect.

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

He nodded and left and came back with the beer a few minutes later. We enjoyed the drinks and I was attempting to hold up my side of the conversation with Jeremy, but it was clear that the hunt was on. The waiter was lurking behind the bar, peeking out from behind hanging wine glasses, conferring with coworkers and looking concerned that I might take flight at any moment.

It was starting to get uncomfortable, so I slammed my martini and gave Jeremy the raised-eyebrow-head-nod that all good partners understand. He asked for the check. Another server, who had been enlisted to investigate further, brought it over. She put down the bill and stared deeply at my face.

“Here’s your…check,” she said.

It was a dramatic read of the line, full of pauses and brimming with underlying meaning. It turned out that we had been charged for two martinis plus the beer. When Jeremy gently asked for a revision, the waiter spasmed into a flurry of apologies and I cringed. He was flustered and claimed the title of worst waiter in the world. The guilt was over-whelming;
I needed to confess and reassure him. My intent had not been to upset anyone, I was just trying to fly under the radar and have a quiet night with my boyfriend. When he arrived with bill number two and a barrage of further apologies, I leaned forward and quietly said, “Don’t feel bad, you were right.”

“Oh I know, you totally do look like her.”

“No, I mean, I am…”

He waved his hands in front his face in an attempt to silence me. “No, I get it, it is just you look SO MUCH like her. Sorry for the screw ups.”

I tried to clarify again but he ran away. I don’t think he ever got what I meant. Because when I went in again a few weeks later, he said,

“Hi?”

An acting career is kind of like herpes; it never really goes away. Most of the time it is manageable, I can live my life normally, but then there are flare-ups. I was listening to the radio one day while I was driving to the post office. They were playing an hour of music from the 90s and had a canned intro that said, “Remember baby doll dresses? Pagers?
Mrs. Doubtfire
?” It was strange. I was a relic. Like a Slinky. I was a moment of nostalgia. It was a time in my life that felt so personal, yet it was shared with enough people that it was a common societal reference to put on the radio.

I cut my hair in another attempt to change my life. I went with bangs this time. Maybe they could be my Clark Kent glasses, the thing that would make me invisible to everyone. All it did was make people stop me in the street to say that I looked like Zooey Deschanel.

Jeremy was entrenched in business school and had precious little free time when he wasn’t absorbed in a Power Point presentation. We managed dinner together every once in a while but I saw him so infrequently that it was laughable whenever someone gossiped that I had left L.A. “to follow a boy.” But what was I doing? At least when I was awkward in L.A., I had context for it. I knew
how
to be awkward there. Now, here I was being awkward in a place where people had a twang and gave directions like, “turn right onto that li’l pig path about a half mile before where that barbeque place used to be.” A place where something called “greens” came with everything and there was such a thing as “good” mayonnaise.

This was a long way from the Menendez mansion or my arty squatters commune in the Valley. I thought back to the days living at the Oak-wood Apartments. My insomniac mother and I would share the Murphy bed and I would fall asleep nightly to reruns of
The Beverly Hillbillies
. The flickering black and white screen and the Standard American accent tape playing on my walkman would lull me to sleep. Now, life was
The Beverly Hillbillies
in reverse.

I came up with the novel ideal of getting what my actor friends called a job-job. Wasn’t that what normal people did? But doing what? No one had bothered to ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up; it would be a silly question to ask a four-year-old who already had a career. Besides, what could ever compare to a profession that places you, twenty feet tall, on the screen and in the hearts of the world? How would the devotees of online fan sites feel about any other occupation? What about the boys who hunched over keyboards, trying to calculate my date of birth from information gathered from
Tiger Beat
, August 1995? They would shake their heads in glow of the screen, awash in disappointment in me. They’d report to their equally disappointed friends, “Dude, she couldn’t cut it. That chick with the hair is a total has-been.”

I had never had a job-job. Sure, there had been a career, but I had
never had one of those things where you go every day and sit in a cubicle or carve little smiley faces into the latté foam. How did a person get one of those? Could I just show up with one of my leftover film resumes, still on the fancy William Morris letterhead? And where could I really work? While I was definitely getting recognized less, it was still frequent enough that asking someone if they wanted whipped cream on their mocha would inevitably be followed with questions about what Will Smith is really like. I would be a liability for the efficiency of a Starbucks line.

Then, there was the issue of not being qualified for anything. Sure, I had some skills but nothing that had any relevance in the real world.

Here is a list of the completely irrelevant things that I am good at:

Finding my light.
This is a skill that is immensely important as an actor and means absolutely nothing in real life. Sometimes I still do it; it’s an unconscious thing. In a restaurant, I will adjust my body so that I am lit well and not sitting in a shadow. It has nothing to do with vanity. It is simply where I am supposed to be. It’s like Rainman counting toothpicks—involuntary yet immensely satisfying. It’s like being bathed in love and acceptance. It’s like hitting the sweet spot in golf or tennis. It is the one time in life when you know you are in the right place. You can close your eyes and when you have found the light, it holds you.

Sleeping upright in a folding chair without messing up my hair or makeup.
This is really vital because the hours on set are long and you need to get all the rest you can. Plus, the hair and makeup people are critically important and you don’t want to piss them off by creating more work for them to fix. You make them happy—they make you gorgeous.